events/... Carson-Newman College, a Christian, private, liberal arts institution, is located in Jefferson City, some 25 miles east of Knoxville. Established as Mossy Creek Missionary Baptist Seminary in 1851, the school began by holding classes in a local Baptist church.

Event Details

Executive Speaker Series: Glenn Hutchins

Carson-Newman’s School of Business kicks off its new Executive Speaker Series Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. with Sliver Lake co-founder and co-CEO Glenn Hutchins. The businessman and former White House advisor and will focus attention on globalization when he delivers “Endgame: Can the U.S. Compete in the Global Marketplace?”

Prior to cofounding Silver Lake, Hutchins, a Harvard-educated (including a joint MBA/JD) Virginia native, began his career at Chemical Bank, moving first to Thomas Lee Partners, and later to the Blackstone Group. In 1999, he established Silver Lake with Silicon Valley venture veterans Dave Roux, James Davidson, and Roger McNamee.

The private equity firm has ballooned into a $14 billion giant with holdings that include or have included Ameritrade, Groupon, Interactive Data Corporation, IPC Systems, the NASDAQ OMX Group, NetScout, Sabre, SunGard and Zynga. The firm garnered international attention last spring with its sale of Skpye to Microsoft for $8.5 billion.

A partial owner of the Boston Celtics, Hutchins has been featured on myriad news programs, including appearances on CNBC’s Squawk Box.

Active in public and charitable service, Hutchins served as an advisor on economic and health-care issues to President Bill Clinton during both the transition and at the White House. A director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and vice chairman of the board of the Brookings Institution, he also serves as a director of the Harvard Management Company, which oversees the school’s $32 billion endowment. Other service includes chairing the advisory boards for Harvard’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute and New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

“This is a great way to begin this series,” said Dean Clyde Herring. “Our goal is to offer each semester a noted business professional who can share expertise and the sort of insight that commands attention. There’s no question that Glen Hutchins has those qualities. He is a private equity leader who has helped examine and develop public policy. Beyond that, he helps direct one of higher education’s greatest endowment. To say we’re pleased to offer Mr. Hutchins as our inaugural Executive Speaker is an understatement.”

According to Silver Lake promotional materials, the firm “is the global leader in private investments in technology and technology-enabled industries.”

The co-CEO has seen great change in the course of his career; including thinking he was late in getting the memo of what to call his efforts.

“(I) had been one of the young people in the very beginning days of private equity, so I had seen it from its inception as an industry,” Hutchins said earlier this year in the inaugural interview of Tabb Forum’s “Conversations with Charlie Rose: The New Capitalists Shaping Our World” series.

“In fact,” he continued, “I had been in it for a decade before someone told me we were in private equity, and I had no idea what that meant. It was a polite term for what we called buyouts. Before that, they were called bootstrap acquisitions.”

Hutchins told Rose that Silver Lake’s success owes much to a three-pronged strategy, the first prong of which is specializing in technology, as opposed to investing across different industries.

“Strategy Two was to invest in growth, not leverage—which is serving us very well right now, for a whole bunch of reasons. And Strategy Three was to have a set of skills that allowed us to transform the businesses that we invested in, rather than just be passive, financially oriented investors. Those are the three key strategies, which were at the time highly distinctive,” he said.

The event will be held at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, October 5 in Thomas Recital Hall, part of Tarr Music Center. For more information on the Executive Speaker Series or C-N’s School of Business, contact 865-471-3316.